Making Both Ends Meet eBook

The exhaustion of these workers was partly attributable
to their custom of pursuing their trade not only in
factory hours, but outside the factory, at home.
Within the last year, the most widely constructive
effort to abolish sweated home labor from the needle
trades ever undertaken in this country has been initiated
by the New York cloak makers, to whom we next turned
for an account of their industrial fortunes.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 22: These testimonies are cited from
the brief for the Illinois Ten-Hour Law, prepared
by Louis D. Brandeis and Josephine Goldmark.

“Instead of becoming wearied by personal labor,
as in earlier stages of industry, it is to-day the
unremitting, tense concentration of watching the machine,
the necessary rapidity of motion, that fatigues the
worker.”

Dangerous Trades. Thomas Oliver, M.A., M.D.,
F.R.C.P. London. 1902.

“The introduction of steam has revolutionized
industry.... While machinery has, in some senses,
lightened the burden of human toil it has not diminished
fatigue in man. While the machinery pursues its
relentless course, and insensitive to fatigue, human
beings are conscious, especially towards the end of
the day, that the competition is unequal, for their
muscles are becoming tired and their brains jaded.
Present-day factory labor is too much a competition
of sensitive human nerve and muscle against insensitive
iron.”

“With the progressive division of labor, work
has become more and more mechanical. A definite
share of overfatigue and its sequels, especially neurasthenia,
must be ascribed to this monotony—­to the
absence of spontaneity or joy in work.”

Proceedings of the First International Convention
on Industrial Diseases, Milan, 1906. Imbecility
and Criminality in Relation to Certain Forms of Labor.
Professor Crisafuli.

“When only one brain-centre works, it becomes
overfatigued much more easily than if the functions
were alternately performed by the various centres.

“Here, then, is another factor in overfatigue
due to the monotony of work, interrupted only
at long intervals.

“This monotony is the determining cause of local
disturbances and endangers the entire organism.”]

CHAPTER V

THE CLOAK MAKERS’ STRIKE AND THE PREFERENTIAL UNION SHOP

Forty million dollars are invested in New York in
the making of women’s cloaks, skirts, and suits.
One hundred and eighty million dollars’ worth
of these garments are produced in New York in a year.[23]